France Sees Its Heritage in Its Crumbling Lighthouses

STEVEN ERLANGER

Wednesday

Apr 23, 2008 at 4:02 AM

With time, harsh weather and automation, France’s lighthouses are disintegrating. And efforts to save them are an uphill battle.

ÎLE D’OUESSANT, France — From this farthest edge of France, where the rain comes horizontally off the ocean, there is nothing on the horizon except waves and lighthouses, marking the line between land and sea, sea and sky.

Built as a technical aid to sailors, their architects often unknown, France’s lighthouses have increasingly become a symbol of the nature of the country, of its “patrimoine,” or patrimony — a word that here carries a spiritual quality of patriotism and nationhood.

It was a Frenchman, after all, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, who invented a crystal lens for lighthouses, and another who thought to rest the turning lamps on a pool of mercury, which conducts electricity and moves with the earth.

But with time, harsh weather and automation, France’s lighthouses are disintegrating. Nearly all the lighthouse keepers are gone, including all who maintained the interiors of the lighthouses far at sea. With the introduction of global positioning satellite networks, the lighthouses are no longer as crucial to the lives of mariners or to the business of the state.

But the French still do not fully trust the American G.P.S. devices, and the law requires lighthouses and beacons. There is no requirement to save the beautiful ones — just to have a strong light that is visible up to 30 miles out to sea.

For Marc Pointud, an expert in maritime treasures, the disintegration of France’s lighthouses is a sin against civilization. He founded the National Society for the Patrimony of Lighthouses and Signals to save them, and in a cover article in a recent issue of Chasse-marée, or Tide Hunter, the country’s boating bible, he sounds the alarm.

“The lighthouses, and especially those in the sea, nourish the collective imagination,” he wrote. “They bring an epic dimension that belongs to the great legends and erect a patrimony in a unique and inseparable whole.”

In person, over Breton cider, Mr. Pointud is more relaxed, but still insistent. “The lighthouses are the symbol of the presence of man on the sea,” he said, “and they make people dream.”

He recognizes that an effort to save lighthouses far at sea like Armen, La Jument and Kéréon, all now automated and without keepers, is likely to fail. “It’s always a question of the budget,” he says, adding that the state cares about maintaining the light rather than the elegant structures in which the bulbs reside. “Too often, for them, it’s like a traffic light, not a part of our patrimony.”

Mr. Pointud has thoughts of tourism — charging more to see the lighthouses and using the money for repairs. But the state is not set up for financing of this kind, and the Ministry of Culture, charged with maintaining “le patrimoine,” concentrates on much older, grander buildings on land.

France still has a Department of Lighthouses and Signals in its Ministry of Infrastructure, and there are perhaps 150 lighthouses of distinction in this maritime country, which lacks a coast only on its eastern border.

Philippe Genty, who leads the department in this part of Brittany, called Finistère — the end of the earth — is doing his best to save the famous lighthouse of Eckmühl, built in the 1890s with a bequest from the daughter of one of Napoleon’s marshals, to make up, she said, for the blood her father had spilled.

What was constructed is beautiful: a tower of local Kersanton granite 60 yards above sea level, with a curving staircase of 272 steps tiled in pale blue-green opaline glass, rising to a wood-paneled room with a statue of the marshal and a marble ceiling, with brass finials. Now, many of the opaline tiles, no longer made, are cracked or broken, the iron is rusting, and the paneling and the ceiling have been dismantled to replace the rotted beams. The marshal is kept in a storeroom.

“We see the lighthouses as technical, but they are also beautiful,” Mr. Genty said. “We want to maintain the patrimony, our heritage.”

After pushing his department, and trying to work with the Ministry of Culture, Mr. Genty has $239,000 to begin to caulk the granite and replace the rotting beams and rusted iron.

“What we have is sufficient to keep it functioning, so it doesn’t fall down,” he said. “But in 50 years, if we don’t fix them, they will all fall into the sea.”

Mr. Genty is working with Pierre Alexandre of the Finistère office of the Culture Ministry, who notes that the region’s lighthouses, because of both their navigation and historical value, are the most important in France. He is providing some money for technical assessments of the five lighthouses here classified as historic monuments, including the oldest, Le Stiff.

“At this point, we can’t think about investing in the lighthouses in the high seas,” Mr. Alexandre said. “It’s not considered feasible.”

Le Stiff, 105 feet tall and on the eastern edge of this small island, has warned sailors since 1699. Then, huge coal fires were built at its top; now, its rose-colored panes are lighted by a large halogen bulb, controlled by computers on the ground, and many of the rooms are shut because of rotting floors and beams.

The Creac’h lighthouse, on the island’s western end, is much taller, 180 feet, but also has severe structural rot. Its wonderful staircase is closed to tourists because the banister is too low and the risk of accidents too high.

Kéréon, built at sea, is revered for its elegant shape, oak paneling and the fine marquetry of its interior, with a large central star — the symbol for the lighthouses of France — worked in ebony and mahogany on the floor. Known as “the Palace of the Seas,” Kéréon has beds built into the wood-paneled walls, and the two lighthouse keepers used to walk around in felt slippers to polish the floors.

But now Kéréon is empty, visited only by technicians at long intervals, and its interior is said to be disintegrating from humidity and water damage.

Jean-Yves Berthelé, 52, was one of the last keepers of Kéréon, working a shift that included two weeks in the lighthouse, one at home, one in the lighthouse and one at home. It was beautiful, he said, “but also very repetitive.” The two keepers had to find a way to break the routine of washing the lenses and windows and maintaining the equipment, and to get along, he said. Television did not come to Kéréon until the late 1980s, “so we cooked all the time,” Mr. Berthelé said. “As we French say, good morale is in the plate.”

Lighthouse keepers were infamous for their drinking, and the archives examined by Jean-Christophe Fichou, a local scholar, are replete with stories of crime and violence.

This being France, which loves lofty language and fame, personalities have a lot to say on the subject. In an episode of “Thalassa,” France 3 television’s long-running homage to the sea, Richard Bohringer, an actor, compares the lighthouse keeper to “the lion, the Masai, the butterflies of the Amazon.” The lighthouses, he says, are “part of our poetics, part of the human adventure.”

In the same episode, the designer Philippe Starck says, “I find in the lighthouses the whole spectrum of the intelligence, the dreams, the vision and the emotion of mankind.”

Capt. Didier Salun, 47, had a career in the French Navy before working for the ferry company Penn ar Bed, based in his hometown of Brest. “The sea is master, mistress, wife, kitchen,” he said, laughing, as he stood at the bridge of his ship. “It’s a passion for me, spicy; when the weather is bad it’s very dangerous here, and I like that a lot.”

The ferries have two G.P.S. systems, but they are often inaccurate, Captain Salun said, adding: “We know the signals and rocks. And the lighthouses. It’s the first landmark you see, the beam of light, and we know where we are.”

The state should restore the lighthouses, Captain Salun said. “They’re beautiful, but there’s absolutely no maintenance now,” he said. “They do the minimum, and it’s a sad story.”

Mr. Fichou, a schoolteacher in Brest, wrote his doctoral dissertation on France’s lighthouses and has published three highly regarded books on the subject. Like Mr. Pointud, he loves the lighthouses, but he also says that Mr. Pointud is too misty-eyed about them and “speaks a little too loudly.”

“The question is what we can afford to save,” Mr. Fichou said. “It’s very expensive, and we’ll never be able to save those on the high sea. Nor can we get tourists out there — it’s too expensive and too dangerous.” Building them was a great engineering challenge, and the engineers tried to make them elegant, he said, “but it was a time that’s finished.”

Because they are deteriorating, “of course our interest is awakening,” Mr. Fichou said. “But there is beauty also in the fact that some are crumbling.”

Mr. Berthelé, the former keeper at Kéréon, still works for the Department of Lighthouses and Signals on Île d’Ouessant, a treeless, sheep-filled island visited by as many as 1,000 tourists a day in the summer. Like the other former keepers, he sits in an office watching computers and weather reports.

Asked if after his time in the lighthouse, he was frustrated by everyday life in a more typical house, he thought for a moment and then said simply, but with a great and sudden passion, “I hate curtains.”

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